by BasharOfTheAges » Thu Mar 29, 2012 3:14 pm
So this week I get back to work and i'm told they have this little side project they want me to work on. I need to reproduce this system that I cobbled together from spare parts a month or so ago and this time i need to make two of them. That's great, I think, I documented the whole process and made simple build instructions - I'll have this thing done by the end of the day on Tuesday. Look at the servers they gave me, and the disc geometry is all wrong for my ghost images. Okay, I think, that'll set me back a few hours while I dig out the old OS build instructions from 4 years ago. Manage to finally find them, use them to install one of the boxes. Instructions were incomplete and incorrect - had to manually tweak some things, but I manage to layer some of the software onto the box before coming to the realization that one of the suites of software has been through a major overhaul and isn't exactly compiling correctly due to bad links. Takes me several attempts and several hours to finally get the thing going by about 10AM this morning. It's still not 100% at all of the functionality, though - something was left out of the build apparently. Fine, I think, i'll just forget that portion of it and make sure if the underlying code works. Try to bring up the software and constant crashes greet me. After an hour of cryptic debug scouring (this is software that was deprecated 2 years ago) I realized there was a piece missing from the hardware that, while not necessarily needed for this application, the old code was written entirely around the idea that it was there. My previous, much longer effort at hacking this system together, just ignored the functionality of the missing piece of hardware, since we were reusing old pieces that we had no other use for. The new boxes weren't old hardware - they were newer and couldn't fit all the parts in, so they never installed them. So here I am an hour before quitting time with about 20,000 lines of obfuscated C to sift through, trying to figure out how to make this stupid software do something it was never designed to do.
Fun go-along to the above - I've been pass-out exhausted all week. I honestly think I need to get my thyroid levels checked again. I've been finding it hard to stay awake for normal amounts of time since right before Tekko.
Last edited by
BasharOfTheAges on Thu Mar 29, 2012 3:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.